Final entry, Reentry

I am already back in New York, soaking my soul in the rain and blooming under the grey skies. When I got off the airplane at JFK I was overjoyed to be welcomed by a cold drizzle. Just what I wanted. Water=life. But before that, before the endless hours of movement and waiting that conveyed me home, finally, there were the lasts. The last pomegranate juice, the last trip to the souk, the last ride on Pele (my horse), and hardest of all, the last goodbyes to the students. One brought me a bag of cookies. Another, a stuffed animal. Where will they be in 5 years, I wonder with the hungry anticipation of my own homecoming. Doctors, I hope, all of them. But I know some will not make it—through the program, or maybe even through this life… I hate to even think those thoughts, but my favorite student went home for the summer holiday. He is Iraqi, and his family lives in Bagdhad. When the American media reports the deaths of Iraqi civilians in the newspapers, they of course never name the victims. Who would know them? And so I wonder, and worry, about Mohammed Jwad. He can’t go outside of his house. Ever. Once a week his family sends someone to the store for supplies. Some summer break, huh?

Getting to know the Arabic students was one of the experiences I am most thankful for from my time in Doha. What an opportunity. An American getting to talk to young, intelligent Iraqis about what is really going on over there. Getting to talk to a young Qatari girl about why she likes to wear a veil when she goes to the mall, even though she doesn’t wear one at school. And just becoming familiar and comfortable with a landscape studded with abayas and throbes, strewn with rubble and shimmering with middle-eastern desert heat. But the students, really, were the best part.

A couple of weeks before the end of the term, the students organized an “international night” where they all donned their national dress. This left we Americans with a dilemma. National dress? Jeans and a T-shirt? How pathetic. But all we could think of were terribly hackneyed and sometimes even offensive stereotypes (cowboy hat and boots? pinstripe suit? finally someone thought of a poodle skirt, but those are hard to come by in Doha), so most of us just wore some dressed-up version of what we wore to work. Kind of a sad moment of confronting our own cultural poverty, I thought. But I digress, because this story isn’t about us. It is about the most beautiful moment I experienced over there. Yes, swimming at midnight in the Persian Gulf with so much phosphorescence in the water you couldn’t tell where the sea stopped and the starry sky began (my birthday camping trip on the beach) was unbelievably beautiful, but really, this was better. The students were beautiful. And I don’t just mean their scarlet and emerald saris,their crisp white throbes, their elaborately embroidered abayas. I mean, the Syrian kids and the Lebanese kids with their arms around each other. The Palestinian kid rakishly sporting a red-white-and-blue Uncle Sam hat with a grin.It was humbling to see that it was so easy.

And then I saw them dance.

I mean, ok let me go back. First there was a fashion show where students paraded down the isle showing off their beauty and culture. Then there was to be a performance by a hired troupe of Indian dancers. But first all the Iraqi boys got up to do their own dance. All clad in the white throbes and, most recognizably, the black-and-white-checked headscarves so vilified in the American press. Someone sat on the side of the stage and played a drum, or something. Honestly I don’t even remember the music that they danced to, and I always remember the music. I was just so mesmerized. They all stood in a row on stage and held hands, and as they hopped and shuffled their feet in a step that they all seemed to instinctively know, my heart lurched. With heads bowed, they slowly moved in a halting cadence across the stage and down the steps, threading their way through the crowd now clapping its enthusiasm. That’s when I lost it. I tried to keep it together but I couldn’t I just cried right there. I cried because it hit me in the most immediate and visceral way the tragedy that we are perpetuating over there in Iraq. I don’t care what your politics are. You’d have to be made of stone to watch these brilliant, dedicated boys—the true promise of everyone’s future—dancing and smiling with clasped hands and not feel yourself implicated in the destruction of their world. It all came in a rush that night and for days afterward I walked around in a weepy stupor, breaking into tears whenever anyone talked about it. And everyone did, because I was not the only one devastated by that night. It seemed that everyone was talking in whispers, confirming with one another that we had all witnessed something great and moving and, yes yes I felt it too. Extraordinary.

It is all so far away now as I sit at my desk here in Burdett, New York in the cool, damp breeze that seemed so impossible there in Doha. Would I go back? Yes. Would I live there? No. I don’t like Doha enough to make it my home, but I loved my experience and my students enough to sincerely hope that I’ll get to see them again.

As an epilogic note, one of my favorite and most embattled Qatari girls emailed me a couple of days ago. All semester she struggled with her papers, shyness and inexperience with English combining to make her almost mute. But she had faced down her family, culture, and country (she was a niece of the Sheika) to enter this program, and she wanted to be a doctor more than anything because, in Qatar, women can’t see male doctors…and there are practically no female doctors. Therefore, that’s right, women basically can’t see doctors. So first she had to convince her family that it was appropriate that she go to medical school. Then she had to prove to them that she could hack it. Then she had to pass her bio, chem., orgo, physics, and biochem classes, and do well on the MCAT, and write essays about philosophy (all this in English of course, which she only learned a couple of years ago) while still fulfilling her duties at home. Needless to say, I was worried about her. I honestly didn’t know if she would make it. She was a second-year student, which meant that this was the moment of truth. Well, as I said, she emailed me. And she got in to the medical school. Again, I wept. One more woman doctor in Qatar. I was lucky to be a part of that.

I’ll keep this up (tho I’ll probably change the name), so check back for updates. Thanks for coming with me on this adventure. The only constant is change, and I’ll never be the same.

I love you all.

Turkish Delight Part II: Mediterranea

Flying out of Istanbul and renting a car in Antalya was definitely a good decision. Winding down the coast in the dark, we soon found ourselves sitting by a bonfire with a hearty brew thrust into our hands by a couple of hearty aussies whose self-proclaimed employment was “making jokes and acting like jerks”. They “worked” (using the term loosely) at Kadir’s Treehouses where we spent our first Mediterranean night, shivering underneath piles of crusty blankets in a 3-bunk shack built up in a tree with the girthy trunk running right through the middle and taking up most of the space. The novelty of the lodging and the company were worth the poor night’s sleep, but we were thankful for the warm sunshine in the morning. We awoke to find ourselves a 10 minute walk from the ancient city of Olympos, a town that centuries ago had been expelled from the regional government on the grounds that it harboured pirates. The ruins were situated along a narrow stream that led us straight to the beautiful, secluded, pebbly beach of the Mediterranean sea. We had to swim. Yes, it was cold. But we had to. And really, like the Newfield gorge in early summer, once the initial shock passes and the cold seeps in, you feel emboldened by it, and strike out swimming more strongly than you thought you could. Once in I didn’t want to get out, but I soon was chilled to the bone and shivered back into my clothes with salt in my hair and a gnawing void in my stomach. Luckily, not too far down the beach an old lady in a split skirt and headscarf was shuffling around some tables laid with faded red tablecloths.
She looked like the kind of lady whose food I wanted to eat, so we sat down and ordered calamari and 2 different whole fishes, beer, and fresh orange juice from the trees out back. Perfect.

That night we hiked up a hill to the Chimaera, or eternal flame, where some sort of petroleum product seeps out of the rocks and fuels several small, natural fires that have been burning for centuries. We made our way to the flames around dark with a bottle of wine, crusty bread, cheese, olives, and dried figs for our dinner. We laid on our backs and looked up at the stars for what seemed like hours and stumbled down the hill in the dark with only the light of our cell phone screens to guide us. We found accommodation at a humble little guesthouse with the best breakfast we had the whole trip, and picked some oranges from the trees out back for the next leg of the journey……which wound up into the mountains through hairpin switchbacks lined with olive groves decorated with grazing goats. We drove first to the ruins of Arykanda and then to Kas, a little tourist town on the coast where the mountains plunge into the sea. After accidentally buying 2 kilos of honey from a dude on the side of the road earlier that afternoon, we decided we better find some good bread to go with it and a vantage point to watch the sunset, so we again scrambled in the fading light up a hillside on the tip of a tiny peninsula and feasted on random things scavenged from fields and street corners and passed around a bottle of cheap red wine. The next day we decided we wanted to get on a boat so, because it was the off season, we found the only boat making excursions that day to a small island belonging to Greece just 40 minutes away. We joined a group of 6 others, but since the boat was only authorized to carry 8 passengers, Eric had to be smuggled in the cabin of the boat and his passport hidden from the authorities.

The island was dreamy. Like, an actual dream. The colors of the buildings and boats were surreal in their muted brilliance, and the whitewashed stone path winding up the hillside that led past herds of sheep and goats to a bird’s eye view of the entire bay was like something out of a fairy tale. It was spring in the Mediterranian, and wildflowers burst from between the white stones and scattered themselves over the windy hill-top. Looking out over the tiny islands and the tiny gleaming boats in the cobalt water, the beauty made my eyes sting and my chest feel tight. After a meal of calamari and fresh grilled mackerel, we headed back for the mainland.

As we approached the marina, Eric was gruffly ordered to leap onto the deck of a neighboring ship before the police arrived to check all of our passports. The boat captain, I think, felt bad about this and made us coffee and shared his cigarettes and we fell into easy conversation. He invited us to stay the night with him on the boat, and offered to make us his famous fish spaghetti, but alas our flight was leaving from Antalya very early in the morning. He did insist, however, that we take the keys to his moped and motor up the road to see the ancient theatre built into the hillside and overlooking the sea. Autumn was the only one amongst us with moped experience, so the three of us clung precariously to the bike and we teetered through the town past old men clucking their tongues and shaking their heads with disapproval. The theatre was like the one we saw in Arykanda only smaller, and positioned perfectly to catch the rays of the evening sun.

After returning the bike and saying our farewells, we headed by car back to Antalya, scoring the LAST room in a city filling to the gills with hippies in town for the solar eclipse that we missed by 3 days. Tired, scruffy, gritty-eyed and delerious, we cracked one last Efes in the Istanbul airport at 5 minutes til 11:00 am. As mom would say, it was noon somewhere in the world.

The Turkish Mediterranean is so beautifully not-quite-European, like the city of Istanbul. A bit rough around the edges and un-self-conscious, like we aspired to be on our journey. I think what is so fascinating about Turkey is that it isn't European, it isn't Asian, it isn't Arabian... It is just Turkey, with its own aesthetic and aura that defies categorization. Like the Turkish language that occupys its own tiny language group whose closest relative is Uzbek, the country itself is un-analogizeable. And its beauty is all the more poignant for its singularity.

And so, with a fuzzy head and peaceful heart I have returned to Doha. Be well my queridos.
Love
Emelie

Turkish Delight: Interlude

I left out the most archetypal event of our time in Istanbul on purpose, because it had to stand on its own. On our last night in town we went to a hamam: a Turkish bath. It was every bit as romantic and transportive as I imagined without really believing it could be so. We walked through a large reception area warmly panelled with blonde wood and smelling of essential plant oils and into a changing area with wood benches and friendly matrons handing out towels and swaths of red-and-white-checked fabric (that proved to be multi-functional in the course of the next hour). Autumn and I had parted ways with Eric of course, and as we pushed open the heavy wooden door and beheld the scene before us we couldn’t help but speculate on the spectacle that was confronting our dear companheiro. We stood in a perfectly round room in front of a huge, round, low, slightly convex marble platform, knee-high and about 15 feet in diameter. Five or six women in various states of undress were sprawled across it, lying on or wrapped in their red and white sheets. We laid our own swaths out on the grey stone and rested our tired lower backs against the radiant heat that grew more intense the closer one laid to the center of the obelisk. After a few minutes of silent reverie, a middle-aged woman in red bikini underwear and swinging breasts, her hair piled pell-mell on top of her head, approached me and said “massage?” I handed her my token that entitled me to a half-hour scrub and she set to work. As I lay on my stomach with my cheek pressed against the warm marble, she poured a rich lather over my back and worked me over with a rough touch and a surprisingly coarse loofah glove. She proceeded to exfoliate every inch of skin, periodically smacking me smartly on the rump and ordering, “sit!” when she wanted me to get up and change positions. At the end she led me to one of several marble fountains around the outside edge of the round room and washed my hair in the tepid water. I returned to the marble slab and laid on my back staring at the high plaster ceiling shot through with star-shaped holes, listening to the low murmur of women’s voices in more languages than I could count. I raised my head and looked around at the scene before me: two dozen naked women in un-self-conscious repose, gossiping, combing one another’s hair, being roughly scrubbed by the pendulously-breasted women bearing tin pans full of hot water… I imagined that the scene here in this bath a thousand years ago was probably not so different, and I felt it curious how patriarchy can create this kind of a space, where women are at ease with themselves and one another, whispering secrets with an easy intimacy that we in the west grasp at but never seem to achieve. I stepped onto the street with a wet head that elicited shouts of “You look very clean! You’ve been to Turkish bath?” in heavily accented English, and I thought, I’ve never been cleaner in my life.

Turkish Delight Part I: Istanbul Was Constantinople…

I can’t write about Turkey all at once. There is too much to say. So I’ll start at the beginning: Istanbul. We arrived on March 17th, a Friday afternoon. Our lovely host Ozerk—friend of Serkan and Orkun, our Turkish friends here in Doha—met us at the airport and whisked us to his apartment in Bakirkoy (meaning “copper neighborhood”). It was a beautiful, unpretentious neighborhood that boasted a luscious Tuesday street market selling everything: fresh fish, bread, olives, cheese, fruits and veggies, household goods… It was just one of the moments that I lamented the lack of street culture in the US. We have farmers’ markets in designated locations, but you can’t buy a fresh grilled-fish sandwich with tomato and onion or roasted chestnuts on a whim from a street vendor in any American town I’ve ever been to, and that is one of our biggest cultural defecits, in my opinion.

Anyway, Ozerk’s hospitality was above and beyond the call for 3 rowdy Americans he didn’t know beyond a couple of email exchanges (another lamentable cultural contrast), and I am very pleased that we got to know this guy. He took us out for a traditional Turkish feast our first night (meat on a stick, handmade tiny raviolis in yogurt sauce, minced meat and potato pastries, tomato and cucumber salad…) and then back to his apartment for beer (Efes! My new favorite international brew! How I long for thee...) and good conversation.

The next 3 days were packed with touristy sightseeing, haggling, and happenstance. First on the list were the Hagia Sofia, the Blue Mosque, and the Basilica Cistern, all right together in the old city known as Sultanhamet. The first is a breathtaking structure dating from the 4th century BC that was first a church and then a mosque. Earthquakes and sectarianism had lent it a ravaged beauty over the centuries, but what really struck me were the marble thresholds of the doorways worn into smooth saddle shapes by 2,500 years of shuffling feet. Imagining the sieges, weddings, deaths and tedium spanning that time made me shiver.

Before entering the Blue Mosque, Autumn and I wound scarves over our hair and we all removed our shoes and carried them with us in dirty black plastic bags. Now as most of you know, the built environment holds far less fascination for me than the natural one, but stepping inside the Blue Mosque took my breath away with the same sensation I used to get seeing Mt. Rainier loom over the Olympia skyline. I was actually speechless, and I honestly felt a sense of reverie that not even the most opulently embellished Catholic church has been able to conjure in me.

Of the three, however, the most fascinating was the Basilica Cistern. Probably about twice the size of the house I grew up in, the cistern was the water source for the ancient city. It was eerily murky with the sound of water dripping from the intricately carved stone columns. It was really shockingly vast, and seemed even more cavernous for the traditional string band playing at one end under a plastic canopy stretched between 4 of the columns. It was gorgeous, really, hearing such music in a giant underground water tank.

Most of the rest of our time in the city was divided between shopping at the Grand Bazzar, walking the streets of Besiktas and Ortakoy, and boat trips on the Boshphorous River, the body of water that connects the Back Sea with the Sea of Marmara and divides Europe from Asia.

We also got quite a taste of the Istanbul nightlife, which my Turkish friends in Doha tell me is “very fast”. The most legendary of our nights out on Taksim Square and Istiklal Street began in a tiny underground smoke-filled bar with stone walls and candles on the tables. A very young musician sat alone at one end of the narrow room, playing an acoustic guitar and singing what were apparently traditional Turkish songs. The small, intimate crowd would shout out requests and the singer (with an incredibly sweet and athletic voice) would oblidge with everyone in the bar singing along. Next we changed genres completely in search of dancing and ended up listening to Turkish hard rock a la Pearl Jam but, happily, very Turkish indeed. Again, the musicianship was so impressive that I found myself transfixed by the skill of the ensemble and oblivious to the ear-splitting volume that soon drove us back to the street.

Finally, we ended up at a bar called Mektup where another traditional band was playing. My comrade Eric decided that it would be cool if I got up on stage and played something, to which I protested vehemently. But when he walked over to the band during a set break and I saw the guitar player coming over to our table, I knew there was no avoiding it. They handed me the guitar with barely a word of English among them and so I shrugged and took the stage. Despite shouts from the audience with requests for Jewel, I played a couple of simple country and traditional numbers that the bassist and drummer could easily follow. Though I hated him for it at the time, I ultimately had to thank Eric for his initiative, because as you can see, I had a total blast.


After crawling blearily home at 4:30 AM, we headed out for Antalya and the mediterranian coast. But more on that in the next instalment. That’s all for now meus queridos!

pockets full of sand

When I got home from Dunestock '06 last Friday night, I had sand everywhere. In the rolled-up legs of my jeans, filling my pockets, crunching between my teeth, making my eyes teary. I shook my head and heard grains of it skittering across the tile of my bathroom floor. I guess it's inevitable when you go to a music festival set on a 50-foot-high sand dune. I didn't go to Dunestock for the music, and thank goodness for that because if I had I would have been sorely disappointed (but more on that later). I went just to see it. And if only for the spectacle, it was worth it. We drove just 30 km or so out of town to the place where the dunes supposedly sing as the wind whistles across the sand. (Due to the off-key screeching of Irish ballads, however, the music of the natural landscape was unfortunately drowned out.) As we approached from the parking area, we beheld a very respectably sized stage facing a huge parabolic sand dune that acted as a natural ampitheatre, accentuating the oddly monotonal cover of The Edge's guitar solo from With Or Without You. At the foot of the dune was a large flat area where most people were sitting. Some people, like our motley crew of Cornell employees and Turkish architects, were perched mid-dune, carving out benches and trying to avoid the constant cascade of sand descending from the feet of toddlers throwing themselves willy-nilly across the euphorically forgiving terrain of the dune. Still others ringed the upper edge, with a bird's eye view of everything: the stage, the beery, dancing expats, the 4 corners of the constellation Orion piercing through the humid sky, the 3/4 moon suspended directly overhead. Mostly we just lounged on the dune sipping our contraband and wincing at the painful covers of "Summer of '69", "Cherry Bomb", and other variations on Aerosmith and Neil Young. Autumn and I ate overpriced chicken shawarma and wondered at where all the handsome expats we saw there usually hung out. Definately not at Rydges, our usual Thursday night haunt. There must be a bar for good-looking expats that we just haven't found yet... At one point we heard a country tune and I took Autumn out in the dusty patch in front of the stage for a lesson in the 2-step. The yellow lights made everyone's pallor sort of sickly but beautiful in a way, too, in that hazy romantic way that stage lights can make almost anyone into a sex symbol. At one point there was a very talented jazz ensemble that took the stage, but it was a short set, and as the next band started up (named "Hard Khor" for the district of Doha from which the members hailed, called Al Khor--very funny) we decided it was definately time to head home. But before we left we *had* to climb up to the top of the dune and then...what? Should we run down? Slide? We decided to take the most infantile approach and descend the dune log-roll style, like you do when you're 10 years old on grassy hills at the playground. Sand, sand, sand everywhere! Filling my mouth and my pockets and my ears. My hair was thick with it, my nose itchy. But it was so worth it. Though Autumn and I somewhat ill-advisedly started together and clonked heads a couple of times on the way down, we managed to avoid injury and any major humiliation. It reminded me of the time I almost got kicked out of the Starwood ampitheatre in Nashville for rolling down the hill at a Spin Doctors concert, and I knew it was the only appropriate way to close the festival.

So, this Friday I head off to Turkey for 10 days. More postings and photos to come after that trip. I hope this finds all of my loved ones well, and I hope that spring is finding you in your respective latitudes. Don't forget to leave comments. I love to read them!

Lots of sandy love,
Emelie

how to amuse yourself in the desert?

Drive around. Whether on the wide open sand flats just outside of town where I like to run or over the sand dunes an hour to the south that I visited on Saturday, driving SUVs in the sand seems to be the primary leisure activity in this bleak country. A group of my friends from work left from the Cornell parking lot around 2:00 Saturday afternoon, and after only a few minutes the sheen of Doha was scoured away by the harsh landscape of a country that bleeds natural gas.
After driving for an hour or so across an unchanging landscape punctuated by yet more piles of rubble ("yay! new rubble!") we arrived at the point where the tarmac ends and the road becomes a well-beaten track into the dunes. The experience of riding in an SUV piloted by a professional dune-driver is somewhat akin to riding a controlled but unpredictable rollercoaster. The goal, of course, is to get the tourists to squeal without rolling the vehicle over. We were happy to provide the obligatory but genuinely involuntary squeals.
Despite my general disdain for motorized amusement of this sort (a la jet skis, 4-wheelers, and the like) it was pretty damn fun. Still, my father's voice echoed in my head as I gazed out at the dunes criss-crossed with tire tracks: "I wonder what this does to the desert ecology?" Thanks for always ruining my fun, dad.

Anyhow, after 45 minutes or so the entertainment shifted from thrill-seeking to sight-seeing as we approached the famed Inland Sea that separates Qatar from Saudi Arabia. As we rolled up our pant legs and wiggled our toes in the briny water, we gazed across the wee inlet on the other side of which I, as a woman, would not be allowed to drive a car. As we watched the light changing on the beautiful rock formations rising from the beach across the water, someone from the group sighed, "Awww. Saudi has topography. No fair."
As we splashed in the shallows, we amused ourselves by taking pictures of each other in the gorgeous evening light and picking out collections of pretty shells. This latter activity became even more diverting when we realized that many of the shells still had very vivacious inhabitants.

The trip was capped off with a stop at a faux Bedouin camp set up by the tour company complete with icy soda pop and piles of dates. It actually was pretty lovely, and a nice place to sit and just watch the light fade and as night crept over the desert.It is weird how the wind changes here. I have noticed it especially in the evening hours on the beach. One minute the breeze will be hot and dry, turning my skin to parchment, but within minutes my hair is curling and a light sheen of moisture forms on the soft hair of my forearms and the wind shifts direction to blow in from the ocean and the air becomes thick and heavy. As a result, twilight comes sooner than you would expect and stars are harder to see, due only to the thickness of the atmosphere and the moisture in the air. But the long shadows cast across the salt flats by the looming dunes left me awestruck, and more than made up for the paltry smattering of stars in the desert sky.

And so, another entry comes to a close. Next weekend is the annual Dunestock festival (no, I'm not kidding) at the "singing sand dunes" about 40 km to the west. I already have a subject for the next post. Hope you are all well and that spring is pushing up the crocuses wherever you are.

Intrepidly Yours,
Emelie